A blogpost by someone who isn’t Ezra Klein or one of his ilk needs to be surprisingly short to hold attention. I find that anything over about a thousand words is risky, but a lot of the issues I want to address simply take more time than that to talk about. A device I have used before is to write linked series of posts breaking down a larger issue into more focussed essays. I use this page to collate those for ease of later linking.

Over the last decade, the US-waged War on Drugs and the international consensus against common sense that it created began to show the strain of four decades of failure. But over the course of 2013, after the ballot legalisations in Colorado and Washington in 2012, we have seen such rapid movement towards cracking the engineered consensus on cannabis prohibition that we might finally be returning to a rational, evidentiary global policy environment. More than any other single issue in modern politics, the War on Drugs is confounded by generations of flawed orthodoxy, closeted and explicit racism, and deliberate, systematic misinformation.

This series gathers together what we actually know and presents the arguments for a significant revision of international drug policy. For reasons beyond my control the series stalled in early 2013, and had to be revised and republished after I got back online in December 2013.